Transitions

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently Calligraphies; two collaborative books, A Different Distance with Karthika Naïr and DiaspoRenga with Deema K. Shehabi; one essay collection, Unauthorized Voices; and twenty-two collections of translations from the French, including Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz, and Claire Malroux’s Daybreak. Over the course of her fifty-year career, she has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Presentation Piece, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Argana International Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a former editor of The Kenyon Review and the French literary journal Siècle 21, and she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives between Paris and New York.

“For more than half a century, Marilyn Hacker has managed to both handle the sonnet—and the crown!—with care and wield it like a weapon. This, then, is a book of evidence: Hacker’s use of the thirteenth-century form shows readers that poetry is always contemporary and that there is no subject unworthy. These are poems of motherhood and poems protesting genocide and poems of survival and of death, and as Hacker herself might say, ‘I know just enough to mourn / yesterday’s dead.’ Hacker’s sonnets remind me that ‘fine’ was one the highest compliments for connoisseurs of fine art. She is a fine poet.”—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition“To read Marilyn Hacker’s Transitions: New and Selected Sonnets is to be reawakened to the far reaches of what the form can contain, and the glorious dimensions of a life in poetry. Each sonnet functions like a strand of DNA that in its elegant specificity holds a map of the totality: love poems and lust poems and love and lust poems, the speaker unfurling into queerness, poems of war and other violations, illness and an escalating limp, and overarching it all, death that instigates the kind of grief that is not a phase but a bottom line, requires language and silence in equal measure to endure it, death that performs like a Shakespearean actor its job of foreshadowing our own. The exquisite designs of the sonnet crowns alone are evidence that we are in the presence of royalty. How fortunate we are to live in Marilyn Hacker’s time.”—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry"In Transitions, Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes the compact form of the sonnet with a capacious survey of time and place, paying homage to love and absence. This rich collection of a life fully lived speaks from the experience of translator, lover, lesbian, and feminist—from youth and age. I applaud these smart, honest poems that detail both the joie de vivre and the ennui of living. This is a collection to be savored."—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo